Alfredo Diez Nieto: the necessary teaching

November 5, 2020

A few days ago, composer Alfredo Diez Nieto was turning 102 years old, to the delight of Cuban music and culture. His career, which began at a very young age, included two tributaries that would define his work, and which show us today as a man of necessary mastery. The first of these can be located in Cuban classrooms with professors Pedro Sanjuán, Juana Prendes, Rosario Iranzo, Jaime Prats and Amadeo Roldán, essential pillars of musical education in the first half of the twentieth century, and very important in shaping the aesthetic formation of the young student. The second, understandable only with the overcoming and learning of the Havana stage, would develop in the United States, specifically at the renowned Juilliard School of Music, in New York. In Cuba, he would focus his attention on subjects such as piano, history of music, counterpoint, fugue, composition, orchestration and pedagogy; while at Juilliard he would narrow the circle further, focusing on specialties such as Composition, under the tutelage of Bernard Wagenaar; Piano, with Edward Steuermann, and Orchestral Conducting, with Fritz Mahler.

This musical armoring has already taken place: Diez Nieto would focus on an admirable teaching cause in Cuba, for our luck and the development of music, with vanguardism and tendencies as points of aim, which from the 1940s and 1950s would be decisive in the compositional realm, from the prism of aleaticism as a base, but including tendencies such as nationalism, still in fashion in those years, for some musicians who admired authors such as Rimski-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, Edvard Grieg or Antonin Dvorák. And although framing Diez Nieto in a tight style would be dangerous, we could also affirm his profound interest in themes of Cuban nationalist character, with very broad force in recontextualizing and questioning –musically– the various more conventional instrumental potentialities, to propose an irreverent and transgressive discourse, not based solely on the use of percussion as a vehicle of passage, but endowing the rest of the instrument families with a renovating and free language.

His authorial genius moves in two fundamental directions: works for piano and chamber music, and although it includes other formats and instruments, I want to highlight his creations for band (90th Anniversary, Memories of Spain and Evocations of Spain) and his Prelude for Organ, thus being a comprehensive composer and concerned with highlighting and making visible uncommon areas of our music.

Haste, and an occasional dose of regrettable forgetfulness, have been very common elements in recent years, where knowledge and veneration toward musicians of notable worth find very few promotional and teaching spaces, and irreversible paths are traveled in the preservation of Cuban musical and pedagogical legacy. Alfredo Diez Nieto is a pillar of strength in both senses, and a generational link that still has much to teach us. He is the man who, through his music, provokes our admiration, for having believed –as Martí decreed– in the utility of virtue, by dedicating an entire life to consecration and necessary mastery. Cheers, Maestro!